School of Medicine

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Current Research and Scholarly Interests
Developing microfluidic- and nanotechnology-based diagnostic tools, techniques, and devices for medical applications (particularly for detection and monitoring of Cancer) at the point-of-care (POC).

Current Research and Scholarly Interests
Saiful has completed his PhD at the Molecular Neurobiology division in the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics of the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. He has a strong background in molecular biology and is highly experienced in method development. Single-cell transcriptomics is his key area of interest. Saiful developed two methods in the single-cell field; Single-cell Tagged Reverse Transcription (STRT) and molecule counting at single cell level using Unique Molecular Identifier (UMI). One of the goals of his research is to identify the cell types in a complex tissue ? a fundamental question in cell biology. In his postdoctoral work at Stanford, Saiful is applying single cell transcriptomics methods to the field of immunological self-tolerance in human. In addition, Saiful is also involved in screening for chemical and genetic strategies to improve a rare genetic disease caused by a defect in N-glycanase and associated with abnormal accumulation of misfolded glycoproteins.

Bio
Dr. Masaki Ito started his research career since April 2015 as a visiting scholar at Department of Neurosurgery (Dr. Gary Steinberg lab), School of Medicine in Stanford University. Since April 2016, Dr. Ito was appointed as a postdoctoral fellow. During the past year, he has learned multiple techniques and has become efficient in using various equipment and tools to conduct his experiments. He has also developed logical and scientific skills, including experimental design, data analysis, discussions on progress and pitfalls, as well as presenting his work in national and international conferences. Dr. Ito has been involved in projects where optogenetic and chemogenetic approaches were used to study stroke recovery. He continues to study neural circuits underlying post-stroke recovery. In particular, Dr. Ito primarily interrogates a known circuit but still yet unraveled role of the contra-lesional cortex in post-stroke recovery. He has made excellent progress to address several research questions. First, he has investigated the transcriptome profile of the primary motor cortex using RNA-seq, and has identified several key molecular mechanisms that may underlie spontaneous functional recovery after experimental stroke. Second, he has conducted cellular cortical activation mapping at multiple time points after stroke by using immunofluorescent staining with activity dependent markers. Dr. Ito will continue to address multiple questions to uncover the role of contra-lesional cortex for post-stroke recovery. Future experiments will elucidate whether manipulation of contra-lesional cortex activity during post-stroke recovery in beneficial or maladaptive, and if there is a time-dependent role. Besides stroke recovery research using experimental stroke model in rodents, he has also contributed a study to investigate changes in epigenetic regulation in Moyamoya disease that are a rare cerebrovascular brain disease with unknown cause.